Timely Snow

Microsoft Office PowerPoint : Welcome to PowerPoint 12! is a new weblog related to the development of the next version of Powerpoint.

Unfortunately, the first post shows how easy it is to produce a nice looking slide that does a worse job than in previous versions of communicating quantitative information. I think it’s clearly harder to figure out how much “sales are up” in the new version than in the old version (which is not something Tufte would be happy about, either).

I’ve come to believe that Tufte’s ideas about PowerPoint are largely a dead end. At the same time, I’ve been deeply impressed with and effected by Cliff Atkinson’s book,

Beyond Bullet Points

. Because it’s written for a marketing audience, it’s ironically somewhat inaccessible to an academic audience, but I think he presents an extremely fruitful framework for thinking about presentations (and check out the tools available on his website www.sociablemedia.com, particularly the storyboard template .

His basic idea is that one should think of a presentation as being like a movie, with an audience, setting, conflict, resolution, etc. Just this concept should be enough to avoid the number one flaw in most of the bad presentations I hear—it’s not clear to me 1. what the point of the presentation is, and 2. what the presenter thinks it means for me (as the audience).

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 24th, 2005 at 9:44 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.